…mostly it's photos of Vankleek Hill.

Fluffy pink balls on long green sticks

I have no idea what this flower is called… but they grow in packs and they look like fluffy plum-sized pink balls. So that’s funny right there.

…what I’m trying to say is, they look like man balls stuck on long, thin green sticks, like they were part of some weird zombie version of roasting marshmallows.

Anyway. For some reason, in 20+ years of taking photos, I’ve never shot flowers with a flash before — at least not during the day, I’ve done it at night, but that was mostly a waste of time… too harsh, and no context.

But recently I started shooting flowers with flash during the day, and I’m really liking how they’re coming out… I started doing it while I was shooting flowers on a windy day, so the flowers were moving and nothing was coming out in focus. Which was frustrating in basically the same way it’s frustrating when two children are screaming in the next booth at the A&W while you’re on the phone trying to help your 90-year old grandfather set up his Outlook email account on a version of Windows you’ve never used before… and he’s holding the phone away from his ear because he recently read something about how cell phones can cause brain cancer.

And he’s mostly deaf.

And you just spilled your A&W Root Beer all over your Teen Burger.

And someone, as a prank, switched your lithium for table salt like two weeks ago.

Yeah. Frustrating. But, with the flash, the focus is tighter / better, and it basically isolates the flowers in the frame without losing the context / background. It’s also helping reduce the number of mini-strokes I’ve been having while shooting in the wind… so that’s nice too.

“Fill flash at half intensity”? Is that real? It kind of sounds like something I’m supposed to have been taught in a class. I’m still not sure if I liked Marilyn or not. I know I passed her course mostly out of charity (and awesome photo essays), so that’s something I can get behind. But then she insisted on testing us on ‘focal length’ and it turned into a math class…

My wee camera actually has adjustable ‘flash intensity settings’, it also has a standard ‘slow synchro’ setting that operates like a “fill flash at half intensity” sounds like it would work.